Does Your Website Need Dedicated Hosting?

Shared hosting is a low cost and a great way to get your website online quickly. However, if your site is experiencing fast growth, then you might need to start considering an upgrade to dedicated hosting. While shared hosting can work for smaller websites, dedicated hosting is where you will get the most flexibility and ultimately better benefits for your site’s visitors.

Slow Loading Speeds

As your site grows, so does the demand on your hosting. Your site loading speed really matters to your visitors. Your site ideally needs to be loading in 2 seconds or less before visitors will go somewhere else. More visitors means more demand on disk and database systems, resulting in a slower experience for your visitors. Fortunately, with dedicated hosting, you can dedicate resources to your website systems and benefit from faster speeds.

Keep checking your site speed index, and if it’s starting to worsen, then consider dedicating hosting for your website.

Growing Quickly

If your website is attracting large numbers of visitors and growing fast, then you will start to run into problems with a shared platform. VPS and shared hosting plans typically limit you to low disk space, memory and bandwidth. While you can sometimes upgrade your plan, even the most extensive plans might not be suitable because your site is still running on shared hardware, with other websites.
Dedicated hosting means you get your own hardware to run your website. This means you are not limited by any logical restrictions placed on you by the vendor. You can have many terabytes of space, on the fastest disks available on a dedicated hosting solution, improving overall performance.

Prevent Blacklisting

When you are running your site on shared hosting, then your systems are likely operating behind the same IP address as others. This means if one of those other websites gets blacklisted, your IP address is probably going to be blacklisted too.

Blacklisting can open you up to all sorts of problems including removing your site from search results and the top email providers marking your emails as spam.

Dedicated hosting usually comes with one or more dedicated IP addresses for free, which removes this problem right away. You can check if your website domain or IP address is blacklisted by searching online for an email blacklist checker.

Essentially, a dedicated server in this scenario gives you back control, helping you to keep off email blacklists instead of hoping that other websites on your shared server are staying within the rules.

Protection Against Online Vulnerabilities

As your site grows, it’s likely to become more of a target for hackers. When you are running on shared hosting, all it takes is for another website on the same hosting system to be targeted, and you are likely to be affected too. DDoS attacks are also frequent these days, resulting in significant downtime and lost revenues for website owners.

Fortunately, with dedicated hosting, you have full control over the networking of your website. You can enable DDoS protection via your hosting provider or 3rd party.

In addition to DDoS threats, hacking is on the rise. By reading the news, it seems like there is a significant hack occurring every day and so many of the smaller ones go unnoticed. Migrating to a dedicated hosting solution means that you also have complete IP address control so that you can enable a firewalling solution to help protect against hackers.

Summing Up

Shared hosting is great to get your online presence up and running quickly, but as you grow there are risks that you need to take into account:

1. Resource contention by other sites on the same hardware
2. Logical restrictions on disk space and computational power
3. Blacklisting is common on shared hosting
4. Online threats are on the rise

By its very nature, dedicated hosting alleviates all of these problems for you. No longer are other websites sharing the same hardware, limiting your performance. With a dedicated IP address, you can enable DDoS protection and other measures to protect your site from online vulnerabilities and hackers.

Finally, having your own dedicated platform means you are back in control, meaning that your email delivery rates are in your own hands rather than someone else's.